1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to printed media production and more particularly to systems and methods for maintaining the aspect ratio and resolution of an image printed on products in a theme collage.
2. Description of Related Art
Conventionally, people have utilized various types of products to edit and print media, such as digital images, graphics, text etc. With the availability of many online products to which digital media may be uploaded, many users seek personalized products having a theme collage through online retailers. A theme collage is a personalized collage of background and foreground images called graphic elements, which include decorative themes, such as background textures, borders, tiled patterns and individual decorative elements such as flowers, birthday images, and so forth, with photographs supplied by the user while creating the theme collage.
Many products have different sizes, or the relationship of the width to the height (aspect ratio) is different, which requires scaling the digital media associated with the themes in the collage artwork applied to the product. This scaling may result in a loss of integrity through changing the aspect ratio and resolution of the media reproduced onto the products. For example, stretching a graphic element, such as a background image, to fit an oblong product such as when wrapped around a photo mug may make the graphic element appear asymmetrical or otherwise distorted. To compensate, existing products tend to pre-generate multiple different versions of theme imagery for specific products such as a Photo Book, Photo Mug, or Poster, as well as for each size thereof. If a new product is introduced, an entirely new set of themes may need to be authored for that specific product resulting in additional development effort and memory, disk space and network bandwidth required to store and deploy that collection of themes.
Theme collage products may require duplication of graphic data in order to accommodate different final-product sizes and aspect ratios, as well as different design variations. A graphic element may require “flattening” to create image data that may be composited with photographs.
Compression of the digital media may also be difficult, resulting in a time consuming process. Rendering, the process of generating a digital image to have a specific appearance combining many elements, is often a time consuming process, since modern digital media may be very large, i.e., several, if not hundreds, of megabytes in size. In addition, importing an image may also be a lengthy process due to the large file size.